“The demons in your head whispering doubt are just part of the process, you need to go to the process to become.  You can’t just arrive,” Loren Ridinger.  This is another one that’s a bit sensitive for me—or at least it brings out the sentiment.  To this day I never realized just how mean my mind can be.  I never saw how mean I was to myself.  There are things that go through my head that I would NEVER say to someone else because I know it would hurt them.  Along with that, I never realized how little I actually believed in myself.  I always knew I wanted approval from other people and I was dependent on their direction and validation to ensure I was doing the right thing.  That lack of belief is because I was never taught to trust myself.  I had very few people around me that I could trust implicitly.  The people I was supposed to trust made it difficult to truly do that.  When we have that level of doubt, it can feel impossible to begin something new.  It can feel like we will never succeed.  If it doesn’t happen right away then it feels even more like something is wrong with us.  But when I heard this quote, I looked at things a bit differently. If doubt is part of the process, what part is it?

I don’t have the full answer to that but I can say that I’m pretty sure the whole purpose of doubt (outside of survival instincts) is to conquer it.  When we are kids we aren’t afraid to try anything.  We believe we can do whatever we want.  I know I’m not the only one who tried to fly….  As we get older that doubt creeps in because we listen to the voices telling us that we’re doing it wrong because we aren’t doing it the way everyone else is.  We listen to the ones who made us believe we were less than or the ones who had no idea of what we were capable of.  So we are self-taught this self-doubt.  Because it is taught, we can teach ourselves to unlearn it.  I have to believe that the process is really about learning to eliminate false senses of danger.  I think it’s also about finding who we are and learning the full scope of whatever it is we’re taking on so we don’t get complacent in learning.  We need to have a sense that we don’t know what we don’t know but that we can learn whatever we need to. 

If we are teaching ourselves the skills we need to get to where we want to go through listening and fighting self-doubt, then we are also teaching ourselves what to believe in. The use of the word demons is powerful to me with the implication of the true darkness that can take us over if we let it.  There are influences outside of us and it is our brain that filters that information so when we are down on ourselves, it is that little demon of self-doubt that we are feeding—and demons need to be exorcised.  We speak of battles in our head and we speak of the importance of words because words have power.  I just told you how cruel I can be to myself—I know all of you can be just as cruel to yourselves too.  If we speak to ourselves like that then how can we win anything?  How can we win against ourselves if we set ourselves up to be beaten every time?  We can’t.  And we can’t get where we want to go without learning the terrain and walking through it.  We need to fight a few things along the way to know that we have a real handle on the situation.  The goal isn’t just to arrive, it’s to arrive transformed and transformation is a process.  Removing those demons is part of the transformation as well.  If we want to move forward, we need to be really honest about this: are we being honest with ourselves or are we being cruel/critical?  Be patient with the process of learning ourselves over again and challenge those demons over and over again until they have nothing to say and then go away completely.  Let it happen.  One day we will all speak kindly to ourselves because we will remember how important that talk is.  That in itself will keep the demons at bay.  So start talking.